CHAPTER XXXIX
We got out to the coast again at last, and so cheaply, too, for our foolish intrusion into the wild against which society protects us, that I had the feeling that we had either stolen about unobserved, or that the evil genius of the place had craftily slipped the punishment into our pocket, and that we might find it when we thought the episode was closed. When, some weeks before, I first saw Kota Bharu I had thought it a pleasingly barbarous place; but then, coming on it out of the wilderness, I saw that it was an outpost of London and Peking. Even the primitive altar in a field, which looked pagan enough when I noticed it on the outward journey, now seemed not so distantly related to St. Paul’s. We were all right again, with familiar things about us.
Next morning we boarded a little coasting steamer for Singapore. She was neat and bright, my cabin was hung with chintz having a pattern of rosebuds, and the saloon table was as well ordered as that of a good hotel. The captain, the kind man, listened to the tale of our fun up country, and then said: “You’d like some news from home. Here’s the papers by the last mail.” Most certainly, secure within chintz curtains again, and with poisoned feet already less inflamed, we wanted news of England. The smiling little sailor re-entered with a week’s bound numbers of the Daily Photograph. I opened the volume.
It had better be confessed. I was anxious to see the news of England, yet the first sight of leeches hanging to my body did not give me a worse shock than that opened page. News from England! O my country! Those blood-sucking worms, those jungle bugs which raised weals, the warnings of fever, the dark forests and the cataracts, the night call of the tiger—if all that were savagery, then what was the word for this? Now the natives we had met, even the peasants far inland, were certainly not barbarians. One learns to respect and to like the Malays. They are a quiet, well-mannered, humorous, and hospitable people; and so I felt I should be disinclined to expose these pictorial representations of contemporary English life to a Malay gentleman, especially the pictures showing our ladies playing tennis (useless to explain to a Malay that such a popular picture is got by holding the camera close to the ground when the lady kicks) and that page full of bathers and dancers, who might remind him of the scandalous days when the house of the rajah caused so much talk in the village. From that newspaper, at a distance from home where it was impossible to get the counterpoise, you might have supposed that England, despairing of her wreckage, was abandoned to vulgar inanities.
In the forest, on some anxious nights when sleep would not come, I had been sustained by the comforting memory of Waterloo Bridge at midnight, and a nook in Surrey, and some corners of Devonshire; in this world things like that, it was strangely certain, did exist, and they were heartening. But by the China Sea I felt a sudden despair for England as I turned those pages, and saw the home life reflected only in such pictures, unqualified anywhere by a word that was not addressed to the mentally deficient. To open those popular sheets seemed to let fly an insane and fatuous blare. There was no sense in the packet. It was only a silly noise. Without a single humorous or serious comment to correct them, those photographs and idiotic paragraphs gave me the first real scare I had had in nearly six months’ travel among the Malay Islands. It was a very subdued adventurer who handed the volume of a week’s news of home back to the nice captain; for it was unpleasant to realize that, though out of the jungle, there was that to go back to.
I had become used to the Malays. I had learned to understand, in a measure, their ways of living and of looking at life. They have solved successfully the problem of accommodating themselves to their circumstances. They are a happy folk. You rarely see an anxious face among them, and never a hungry child. They are not required to regard, as are Christians, the problem of reconstructing their society because they have dismantled it in a grand and protracted mania. They need no old-age pension. Their future is secure, if they will but give a brief time yearly to rice fields, cocoanuts, and fishing nets. But I felt, even with the assurance about me of those rosebud curtains, and the knowledge that the Red Ensign was overhead, a sudden black doubt that I understood my own people, which was a curious accident to happen so far off as the China Sea merely through glancing at some illustrated daily papers from London.